Audiobooks are having a moment. As they soar in popularity, they are becoming increasingly creative - is the book you listen to now an artform in its own right, asks Clare Thorp.
Links of the week December 30 2019 (01)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
6 January 2020
Back in 1878, shortly after he had invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison hit upon an idea. Leaning over his new machine one day he recited the words: "Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow." As he created the first ever audio of the spoken word, Edison dreamed that the technology might one day allow a whole novel to be recorded. Fast forward nearly 150 years, and he'd be pretty impressed to find more than 400,000 audiobooks available to download straight into his pocket.
I've always sort of wondered what I wasn't getting about "Little Women."
I'm pretty sure I read it in school, though I would be hard-pressed to recall a single scene. I know I saw at least part of the 1994 film - the one with Winona Ryder, Claire Danes and Christian Bale - but I remember walking out of the room midway through and never returning, much to my mother's dismay.
Nothing about the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott's perennial best seller particularly stuck with me, and as an adult, annoyance overshadowed apathy as I tried to understand how the literary heroine of so many women I admired - the spunky, independent writer Jo March - would, by the end of the novel, relinquish her art for marriage, and then proclaim that she is the happiest she'd ever been.
What was I missing?
It appears that what I was missing was Greta Gerwig - along with the real-life story of Alcott, on whose life the book was based, with a few major differences.
Of course, Gerwig isn't the first to change the way "Little Women" gets told. People have been adapting, and then critiquing, and then adapting, and then critiquing it for decades - each iteration a kind of Rorschach test for how the world feels about women at the time.
This generation of kids has access to an abundance of digital information and technology from a very young age. And that means that the skill sets of these kids are completely different from those of their parents when they were children. Research by Kids Insights shows how much technology is going to change the future of workforces, with as many as one in four children already having learned to code to some extent. Growing up digital natives, they are acquiring specific skills - often passively while enjoying other entertainments and interests.
As children especially become increasingly involved in social activism, they're also becoming more conscious of their favourite brands' actions - and this is influencing their choices. Global consumers, down to the very youngest, are seeking out companies that care about environmental issues.
"Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one."
That's what William Golding said in his 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. He was talking about the Hollywood movie industry, but he might just as well have been talking about today's publishing industry.
Justin Ractliffe, the new publishing director at Penguin Random House Australia, quotes Golding in a report he's just made to the industry, based on a study tour to the US. Funded by a Copyright Agency fellowship, he did a lot of researching and interviewing and compared the publishing business to another company producing mass entertainment, Netflix.
You've been there. You're having dinner with friends, talking up a storm. After a laugh or a sigh, the conversation falls to silence. You've exhausted a topic. The silence feels awkward, and no one puts forward a new topic. How do you tolerate that moment of nothing?
The most basic way to imply time passing is to announce the time. Then depict some activities. Then give the time. Boring stuff. Another way is to list the activities, giving lots of details, task after task, and to suddenly arrive at the streetlights blinking on or a chorus of mothers calling their kids to dinner. And these methods are fine, if you want to risk losing your reader's interest. Besides, in Minimalist writing abstract measurements such as two o'clock or midnight are frowned upon for reasons we'll discuss in the section on Establishing Your Authority.
A white romance novelist's ethics complaint against the author Courtney Milan for calling her book a "racist mess" led to the censure of Milan and sparked an uproar across the publishing world. Now the novelist, Kathryn Lynn Davis, says that her original complaint about the professional harm she suffered was not accurate.
In an interview with the Guardian, Davis said she was "encouraged" by the administration of Romance Writers of America (RWA), a trade association for romance writers, to file a formal complaint against Milan, an influential former board member and diversity advocate. She now feels she had been "used" to secure a political outcome that she had never intended.
As a controversy over bias and a lack of transparency at the Romance Writers of America continues to roil the country's foremost writers association for romance writers, the RWA has announced that it will postpone the 2020 RITA Contest until next year. The RITA Award is the U.S.'s top prize for romance fiction.
"Due to recent events in RWA, many in the romance community have lost faith in RWA's ability to administer the 2020 RITA contest fairly, causing numerous judges and entrants to cancel their participation," the RWA said in a release. "The contest will not reflect the breadth and diversity of 2019 romance novels/novellas and thus will not be able to fulfill its purpose of recognizing excellence in the genre. For this reason, the Board has voted to cancel the contest for the current year. The plan is for next year's contest to celebrate 2019 and 2020 romances."
I've always been a slow reader. I've loved books since I was a kid, but I didn't identify as a voracious reader until grad school. My writing professors touted the importance of students reading thousands of books before taking a stab at penning their own. So, in an effort to maintain positive habits after graduation, I decided to track my reading.
I'd jumped on the habit-tracking train before: daily words written, weekly miles run. For a while, I even tracked the minutes I wasted on social media (I don't recommend this-it's too depressing). The outer accountability of habit tracking has helped me form healthier routines and utilize my time more wisely. I set my first annual reading goal at 40 books, finishing the final page of book number 40 before the ball dropped that New Year's Eve.
As the year progressed, I read several books I wasn't wild about. In the past, I've always felt at peace with abandoning a book before finishing it. Why waste time on a book I don't love, trudging through to reach an ending that won't satisfy? But reading a book a week made it harder to justify abandonment. I didn't want to fall behind-like I said, Goodreads will tell you when you do. And the thought of that sent my Type A brain into a tailspin. So I wound up finishing several books I felt lukewarm about from the very first chapters. I bolted through short story anthologies cover to cover, most of which I ordinarily would've thumbed through, reading only the stories with openings that piqued my interest. The pressure to finish books sucked some of the day-to-day joy out of my reading life.
30 December 2019
Writers including Matt Haig, Gina Miller and Cressida Cowell give their new year's reading resolutions
Matt Haig
I have been very dark and gloomy with my reading habits this year, perhaps in tune with the social mood. Like a pig sniffing for truffles, I am going to hunt out humour and hope in the new year, and plan to reread Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quartet, which I haven't done since I was a teenager.
I have been told that Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi is very funny, so I will get that too. I also want to read Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things as I am a fan of Neruda and have never read it. It is about the pleasure we can take in everyday items in the world around us, from soap to tomatoes, and I am thinking it will be the perfect antidote to all the big-picture worrying the world is encouraging us to do. I feel a lot of us need to reconnect with the immediacy of the world around us, and so I will seek out books like this, in order to stay (relatively) hopeful about life.
As if the year wasn't bad enough, in 2019 we were obliged to say goodbye to far too many members of the worldwide literary community-from the universally beloved to the highly controversial, from the mega-famous to those who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. So before we break for the holiday, consider this a final farewell to some of the writers, editors, and booksellers we lost this year-though it is certain that for most, this tribute will not be their last.
Prolific and widely loved poet Mary Oliver died early this year at the age of 83. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection American Primitive, and a National Book Award in 1992 for her New and Selected Poems. Known for her simple phrasing and her odes to the natural world-and also, if less so, for her eroticism-she was the rare kind of poet whose work sold, and it seems to have filtered down to just about everyone (i.e. not just habitual readers of poetry).
As a book publishing phenomenon, young adult literature entered the decade like a lion. At the beginning of the 2010s, a generation that had grown up obsessed with Harry Potter and other middle-grade fantasy series decided it wasn't that interested in adult literary fiction, with its often lackadaisical plotting and downbeat endings. YA stood ready to supply them with plenty of action, cliffhangers, supernatural beings, mustache-twirling bad guys, and true love. But now, at decade's end, YA seems to be eating itself alive.
By 2010, Stephenie Meyers' Twilight had already proven that a multivolume YA franchise with a romantic triangle and lashings of paranormal brooding could be a virtual license to mint money, especially when the inevitable movie deal came along. Then the 2012 film version of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, a series already enormously popular in print, was a hit in theaters, adding dystopian yarns to the roster of blockbuster YA themes. To distinguish themselves in an increasingly crowded field, the genre's characters sported ever-stranger and even outright gimmicky special powers-the ability to manipulate iron or kill with a touch or turn into a bee-and they wrestled with societies that dictated who they married, segregated them into factions based on temperament, or subjected them to surgery that eradicated their ability to love. Dystopia was a trenchant genre for middle-class kids who grew up heavily surveilled by parents and social media, as well as pressured to vie for their spot in a relentless meritocracy starting from grade school.
I won't start with Franzen, because nobody needs that. Not anymore. So let's just start with the women.
In late March 2011, the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman interviewed Jennifer Egan about her new novel-in-stories, A Visit from the Goon Squad. It was Egan's fourth book, following a string of minor hits, and it was also that rare event in 21st century publishing - a cyclone of critical and commercial triumph, from airport tables to book-review pages. Treisman read aloud a note from a reader who explained that Egan's writing made her want to "discontinue her subscription to her antidepressants." Goon Squad was a hybrid miracle, a brilliantly arranged postmodern collage with a beating heart warm enough to render SRRI's obsolete. Who knew that could still happen?
The first 400 words of my novel, Adjustments, were written mostly to prove to my publisher, who had asked for the story, that I had no novel to write. I was a non-fiction, just-the-facts writer who had read little fiction as an adult, let alone had any interest in writing it.
The next 138,000 or so words were written to outrun the plot bearing down on me like a gravel truck on the highway. My publisher, unconvinced of my alleged novel-writing improbability, not only encouraged me to continue (and I, apparently, acquiesced), but once several thousand words and the faintest outlines of a real plot had started to take shape, she began to publish the story online in serial installments.
"It's the way Dickens got things going," she said. "It'll work out fine."
Writing a novel serially for release in real-time is a process that, like trying to outrun that truck on the highway, can be both exhilarating and exhausting. You experience the immediate delight of moving a story forward and receiving feedback from readers as the story unfolds. But it also means ongoing pressure that comes when you don't always see the next act unfolding. I don't know if I would write a story in this format again. What I do know is I would remind myself of some things next time.
In the summer of 2018, Putnam published an unusual debut novel by a retired wildlife biologist named Delia Owens. The book, which had an odd title and didn't fit neatly into any genre, hardly seemed destined to be a blockbuster, so Putnam printed about 28,000 copies.
It wasn't nearly enough.
A year and a half later, the novel, "Where the Crawdads Sing," an absorbing, atmospheric tale about a lonely girl's coming-of-age in the marshes of North Carolina, has sold more than four and a half million copies. It's an astonishing trajectory for any debut novelist, much less for a reclusive, 70-year-old scientist, whose previous published works chronicled the decades she spent in the deserts and valleys of Botswana and Zambia, where she studied hyenas, lions and elephants.
As the end of 2019 approaches, "Crawdads" has sold more print copies than any other adult title this year - fiction or nonfiction - according to NPD BookScan, blowing away the combined print sales of new novels by John Grisham, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King. Putnam has returned to the printers nearly 40 times to feed a seemingly bottomless demand for the book. Foreign rights have sold in 41 countries.
There's a joke the rest of the world (and maybe America too?) shares about the baseball World Series-series it may be; world it ain't. The recent CrimeReads "The Rising Stars of Crime Fiction in the 2010s" list was excellent-but of the 12 profiled authors all were either from the USA or Canada with one Brit. America and Canada are great, but hey, it's a big wide crime world out there in the other 95% of the world's population.
So, okay...I think we can be a bit more globally-minded while keeping to the CrimeReads stated criteria (that, perhaps having published earlier, their career has really taken off in the last decade) for inclusion with one extra caveat, for being global-I'll only include those either writing in English or translated into English. And I have to confess, I'm not a committee, it's just me.... and all suggested additions and recommendations welcome....
So here goes ... starting in Europe...
With new takes on Little Women and A Christmas Carol this month, we're doing a Tomatometer deep dive into reboots to ask whether TV is better than film, whether big changes work, and more.
In 1896, a 45-second clip featuring a segment from the book Trilby and Little Billee was produced and started a 123-year old trend of literary works being adapted into films or television shows (and being adapted again and again). With films Little Women (2019), West Side Story (2020, pictured above), Wendy (2020), Emma (2020), and television movie A Christmas Carol (2019) and limited series War of the Worlds (2020) on the horizon, we decided to take a deep dive into the Tomatometer to see which of the literary adaptations are the Freshest, and which are the Rottenest (it's a word).
We pulled the data on 32 books that have at least three feature-length movies (80-plus minutes) or television shows with Tomatometer scores (don't ask about Gone Girl, it's only been adapted once) and created a dataset of 145 movies. We chose to exclude comic-book adaptations and movies like Godzilla that have copious reboots - it's nothing personal, we just wanted to stick with literary adaptations.